may be rude

she was interesting to watch. trump really has been engaging in witness intimidation tactics all along. he made suggestions of investigations into cohen's father in law, not long after cohen flipped on trump. trump said the whistleblower is like a traitor or spy and should be dealt with accordingly, even though they followed whistleblower procedure. it looks like doj may be getting used for political prosecutions. in the investigation of mccabe, a grand jury mysteriously failed to return an indictment, which suggests prosecutors pushing an unusually weak case. in the world yovanovich is used to, corruption reigns and public servants are in danger. trump helped the saudis cover up the kashoggi killing. trump praises brutal authoritarians who kill opponents. jovanovich was hosting an event in honor of a ukrainian anti-corruption activist who was killed with acid when she received a call that she may need to leave her post in ukraine. standing in front of the house committee she looked like she was standing in front of a firing squad. aside from the spectacle of witness intimidation that schiff highlighted, another of the big take-aways from the yavanovich hearing is what krishnamoorthi outlines in his cross examination, below. yovanovich was recalled from ukraine so there could be an interim with no ambassador in which trump sent in the three amigos - perry, sondland, and volker - to zelensky's inauguration. perry talked up his friend Michael Bleyzer to zelensky, and then Michael Bleyzer received a 50 year oil contract, that month. note that this is SEPARATE from the corrupt oil deals lev parnas and igor fruman were pursuing in ukraine during the same timeframe. combining those with the 2 investigations trump was leveraging aid in exchange for public announcements on, it was time to get the stalwart, upright, established diplomat out of there and the trump team decided to slander her for good measure. thursday, fiona hill ought to be good. national security council senior director for eurasia and russia. she apparently went into combat with gop in her private deposition, calling out the harm being done by their bogus narratives.

they are subpoenaing witnesses on an ongoing basis, and they have to strategize around court rulings on compelling testimony. nadler said the mcgahn case is the precedent that will open the floodgates of testimony and documents. bolton said he will testify after the mcgahn ruling is finalized, which means the ukraine stuff won't be done until the mueller stuff is ready to go. i think the mcgahn case has now been through regular court and appeals court and all that's left is for the supreme court to say if they will review the appeals ruling (which said mcgahn has to testify). they don't want to subpoena people until they can enforce it. once the supreme court says the McGahn case Appeals Court ruling stands, which is the expected result, get ready.

right wing media is weird. it's like fox realized they can report stories from fringe websites by using innuendo language to protect themselves, then politicians found the legitimized fake news helpful for getting away with things, and now the whole ecosystem has wound up in crazyland.

testimony from several credible witnesses, text messages, the jul 25 call notes, media statements by trump and giuliani. also trump's stonewalling of documents and testimony is itself damning evidence. why would they withhold evidence that would exonerate him? in addition to the wealth of evidence that's already public, there are a lot of documents and witnesses that may come out during this process following court orders or other developments.

The hearing yesterday ended up being less of a shit show, actually. The usual Republican attack dogs, Ratcliffe, Jordan, and Nunes, looked fearful. GOP members were "yielding back" extra time to the committee instead of yielding extra time to their minority chair. Jordan had been added to the House Intel Committee only last week, which was a curious news item. Now it makes more sense, the GOP is feeling weak so they added an attack dog to the committee doing hearings. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent, who testified alongside Ambassador Taylor, is apparently the man. Kent and Taylor gave dramatic testimony and gave push-back to GOP reps. George Kent's opening statements provided good background regarding the Ukraine US relationship. Taylor's opening statement went on for 40 minutes (and was good). The Democrats have been learning how to do these hearings. The Corey Lewandowski hearing, which was actually a significant impeachment hearing about an obstruction of justice offense in the Mueller report, was hampered by Lewandowski being in full Trump-defense PR mode, and the Congressional member cross-examinations coming before the extended staff lawyer examination. After hours of grueling rhetoric from politicians trying to get reelected and a Trump stooge, with the waters muddied, late in the afternoon, the staff lawyer spends 30 minutes dragging the damning details out of Lewandowski all at once, confirming a fact pattern detailing an obstruction of justice crime. Now the Democrats have learned and they did the staff examinations before the member examinations. After opening statements, both parties had a lawyer-type interview the witnesses for up to 45 mins each. This allowed a longer exploration of the drama of a nation at war with a powerful neighbor, and their ally the US trying to strong-arm the new anti-corruption president to engage in corrupt behavior, and how the publicly weakened Ukraine/US relationship severely impacted Ukraine's negotiating position in peace talks with Russia. The GOP staff examiner seemed meek, slinked back, and was corrected by Taylor at times. He actually wrapped early (they had 45 minutes and he used about 30). The Taylor/Jordan exchange was a spectacle. Right when Jordan starts, you can see Taylor watching intently for the attack. Taylor engages courteously but struggles to tolerate Jordan. Taylor starts glaring tauntingly at Jordan. He points out that Jordan is omitting inconvenient facts that he knows, which had been stated earlier in the hearing. Taylor was top of his class at West Point and is a decorated Vietnam vet. Ukrainian soldiers were wounded and killed on the frontline on a day that he visited, while they were being denied defense aid. Jim Jordan got a JD degree but never took the bar exam, and was an assistant wrestling coach at a college for 8 years. Himes was good. Nice to see Dems calling out GOP when appropriate. The Taylor/Kent hearing is one brick in the case but it came out about as good as it could have. Vindman, Yanakovich, Morrison, Sondland, their private deposition transcripts have been released and the testimony is damning. Yanakovich is tomorrow, Sondland is next week, and Vindman will be a good one, not scheduled yet though. Yanakovich is a badass, Sondland is a squirming Trump stooge forced to correct perjury in order to avoid prison, and Vindman is a decorated Colonel who was on the call and noticed patterns of cover-up behavior in the administration. Quid pro quo aka extortion aka bribery, withholding defense aid in order to extract political investigations from a vulnerable nation that needed our help in their active war with Russia, it's substantiated with an abundance of quality evidence. It will be amazing if the GOP Senate equits Trump, and it will be amazing if they don't. How does the right-wing media machine change course? Fox News has been trying but that ship turns slowly.

Strong performances from Kent and Taylor. The facts are damning. The GOP are weak, but it will be difficult to win removal. These bastards stand to cash in the biggest pay day of their lives in order to shield Trumpo. The dark-money channels are in place, the signals are out, and the motivation is as big as big oil because corrupt oil powers have been propping up Trump and the GOP in order to delay progress on carbon emissions.

shitshow | \/

good one. i'll use it.

^yes! i bet kojima was trying to think of dynamics not involving guns and that's how he arrived at the BTs. it reminds me of sneaking by guards but no gun fights. he said somewhere he doesn't know what kind of game this is, he moved forward without really knowing what he was doing. that helps me understand it. really digging the sci fi setting and story. it's like a good sci fi series that you play sometimes.

probably a valuable advertising spot. and when sam shits there's an ad for his amc show.

here's your sunday morning deniro trump rant. good one this week

bro post em

lol at bolton's sep 10, 2019 resignation letter sept 13 is when zelensky had an interview scheduled, on CNN (Fareed's GPS show), in which he was going to concede to the trump demand and announce investigations into the bidens. before it happened, aid was released and he cancelled. leading up to that: aug 12 - Intelligence Community Inspector General Atkinson passes Director of National Intelligence Maguire the whistleblower complaint sept 1 - sondland informs ukraine that us aid has been withheld contingent on public announcements of investigations (confirming the implicit statement in the jul 25 phone call) sept 9 - IC IG Atkinson alerts congress to the existence of the whistleblower complaint, which should have been passed to congress by DNI Maguire sept 10 - Bolton resigns sept 11 - whitehouse releases US aid to ukraine and zelensky cancels the interview

i didn't even realize the kurds controlled a third of syria until someone mentioned it in a podcast last month. i think it was this oct 19 What's Going on in Syria episode of the lawfare podcast. source: good wapo article from oct 15 what an amazing foot-hold. it could have laid the groundwork for a sovereign kurdish state in the future. people have been saying a kurdish state makes more sense than the arbitrary borders drawn by europeans after ww1. the kurdish people are great, progressive, and were good allies. they actually did fight with the allies in ww2, and they fought with the US in iraq in a big way. what a good outcome it would have been if the kurds had maintained control of a third of syria. the US forces there weren't even taking losses. they were special forces who would just ninja into select operations to take out ISIL targets and they were doing a good job of it. all they had to do was be there, in order to prevent assad/russia and turkey from incursions into kurdish territory. but, before anyone even knew what was happening over there, trump initiated a sequence of events that resulted in the kurds inviting assad back in, in order to protect them from genocide by turkey, because the US left. some are theorizing that this concession to turkey may have been influenced by vulnerability to the trump camp posed by reporting of trump admin involvement in US journalist's Kashoggi's murder by Saudi Arabia in a Saudi consulate in Turkey. trump also owns towers in turkey. the move benefitted putin as much or more than turkey. assad is a russian proxy and syria is a strategic ally for putin for multiple reasons. furthermore, the area is close to the russian border and putin dislikes their neighborhood becoming more west-friendly. known financial links between trump and putin include: suspicious real estate deals with oligarchs suspicious loans from kremlin-linked lender deutsche bank suspicious trump PAC infusions by lev and igor suspicious russian donations to the inauguration committee moscow tower negotiations that cohen lied to congress about at the behest of trump putin funneling money through the NRA probably others i'm forgetting.

i disagree with your premise that "If an event is easy to distort, then it isn't very important." a lot of things are important, like abusing and orphaning immigrant children blowing the potential of talks with north korea leaving the iran nuclear deal provocations destabilizing relations with iran starting a trade war multiple instances of obstruction of justice extorting ukrainian president to publicly announce investigations into biden by withholding us aid they needed to defend themselves from an ongoing active war with russia bribery self-enrichment abandoning our allies the kurds, resulting in assad recovering control of one third of syria not defending the US against ongoing russian attacks on our elections legitimizing and helping the putin oil mafia helping mbs get away with murdering an american journalist leaving the paris accord

people should pay more attention. and not all news is the same. a lot of it is half-assed and ratings-oriented. trump deliberately feeds them less-significant controversies in order to displace headlines about more significant misdoings. maddow, melber, and lawfare have been covering the important trump stuff well. i can understand why you would think that, but anything big will be (and has been) coincided with immediate counter-information from multiple sources, in multiple directions, and with matching or greater intensity. signal blocking has emerged as an effective weapon. under obama, the right wing went insane, and they developed an impressive bubble ecosystem for sophistic rhetoric. A lot of people live in it and a lot of people just don't pay attention so they don't know if the country is actually in trouble or not, and, if so, who is the aggressor.

uh well he's trying to overthrow democracy, and a historically chaotic information environment has left half the country successfully duped. a contested election and subsequent fall of the US seems not unlikely, 12 months from now. we post some jokes here because we need to.

for insight, we have donald trump junior with us.

gonna miss ted lieu's tweets at trump when this is all over.

the way he is regarding rand there also caught my attention. i decided he was thinking "look at rand (also with ru) go. i wonder what will happen to him after i go down and shoot myself"

ui red and green are great

#epsteincoverup is trending, a guy says he's releasing videos at 9am tomorrow. good meme material, apparently.

"he died? oh, that's really sad. we were close. where's the photographer?"